willthisonedo

Yet Another Blog By Yet Another Blogger...

Oh God – another blog. And for what? For nothing, really: probably nobody will every even read this, which gives the entire thing an insane speaking-to-one’s-self feel. Sartre once said (yeah I’m invoking Sartre – it doesn’t bode well does it?) that a writer who writes with no hope of an audience must either put down his pen or put down his despair. Being a mid-twentieth-century sort of guy, however, Sartre wasn’t familiar with the daunting anonymity of the internet, although I’m sure it would appealed to him.

But it’s O.K. isn’t it, because these sites tell you how many views your articles have had? Well yes – that’s a lovely idea, until you realise that your burgeoning hit rate is mostly down to you checking your own blog to see what kind of a hit rate you have, and that any hits which aren’t accounted for by this were probably just poor lost wandering cyber-souls who never had any intention of actually reading your blog, just as you have no intention of ever reading theirs.

And yet we write on. Perhaps someone somewhere will read your article and think – ‘Yes! That’s exactly what I think, now that you’ve said it’, but unless that someone is kind enough to leave a comment saying so then we’ll never know. Each blog is hidden by a thousand just like it, and another thousand only slightly different. And with every word that people spew onto the internet I feel yet more pity for the future historians who will have to sift through this rising tide of opinionated drawl until any sense of historical coherence is lost to them, as it is to us, in the babble of blogs and status updates.

Still though – I’ll be damned if I don’t contribute to their future misery by giving my own two cents of nonsense, however insignificant it may be. Once-upon-a-time people were nominated to write their opinions to the public on the basis of achievement and merit. Now we can self-nominate – a damned arrogant thing to do, and one which demonstrates that, overall, most of us think much too highly indeed of our own talent for writing. I expect I’ll be no different: I’m no art critic, but I’ll critique art; I’m no political analyst, but I’ll analyse politics; and I’m no blogger (yet), but I’ll write about that as well.

I sense that, as an introduction, this isn’t going at all well. Already I’ve managed to insult my intended audience with accusations of arrogance, alienate yet more with smug allusions to philosophers, and predict that my own blog will be of no particular interest to anyone. No matter: people would have to read these words in order to object to them, and so I’ll only start worry about offending when I stop worrying about obscurity.